TraceBar

A macOS menubar app that provides continuous graphical traceroute monitoring, like mtr but native and always a click away.

Features

• Live traceroute — continuous probing with per-hop latency, loss, and hostname resolution
• Menubar sparkline — at-a-glance latency graph right in your menubar
• Time-normalized heatmap — scrolling history visualization with multiple color schemes
• Adaptive probing — faster updates when the panel is open, slower when idle
• Configurable — probe intervals, history window, max hops, DNS resolution, color schemes

Install

brew tap tracebar-app/tracebar
brew install --cask tracebar

Or download the latest .dmg from Releases.

Requirements

• macOS 14.6+
• Xcode 15+ (to build from source)

Architecture

Single-process sandboxed app. Uses unprivileged SOCK_DGRAM ICMP sockets — no root privileges, no helper daemon, works inside App Sandbox.

TraceBar.app (SwiftUI, menubar-only, App Sandbox)
  ├── TracerouteViewModel — state management, adaptive probe scheduling
  ├── ICMPEngine — SOCK_DGRAM ICMP, TTL manipulation
  └── Views: SparklineView, TraceroutePanel, HeatmapBar, SettingsView

License

MIT